


Darkside of London

by Spuckklerr



Category: Original Work
Genre: Action, Gen, Magic, Undead, Urban Fantasy, gunfights
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-03-10 19:36:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13508355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spuckklerr/pseuds/Spuckklerr
Summary: A secret organisation fights to keep a world of supernatural horrors out of the mundane world. However, a recent undead uprising and other new developments in a strange 'other half' of the world have brought them into full alert. Other groups are beginning to act, though not all have such a noble cause.Whether it means employing the help of people who have just stumbled into this world or those who have forsaken part of their humanity in return for demonic powers, they will do whatever it takes to push back the encroaching darkness.





	1. Delicate Matters

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to thank The Secret World (now known as Secret World Legends) and Stranger things for getting me way into the urban fantasy genre, which has officially become my obsession for forever and ever...
> 
> I mean _really_ into it.  
>  ( _Hello I walk/_  
>  _in to empty_ )

_Cold. So cold._

The fireplace crackled next to his chair; his hands were tightly clasped around a piping hot cup of – he wanted to assume it was tea or coffee, but given the types of customers at the pub, he decided not to assume anything. He wanted to drink at least a little bit, if only out of necessity. He felt the sting of the heat burning his hands, but he was cold. No matter what he did, how many layers of thick clothing he put on, how many fires he lit near him, he was cold.

He saw droves of other things nearby. He could tell they shared his pain. The building was populated with half-decayed corpses, limping as they staggered to their tables on patchy legs, snarling, wrinkly beasts with dark skin and thick, mucus-like saliva that dripped from their hundreds of pointed teeth down their chins, as they starved and shivered. 

Then, on a table not far from his, there was a group of creatures who, like himself, looked human with the exception of their clay-grey skin. The only communication that seemed to go on between them seemed to be when one of them passed a mug or some other object to another. He could see each of them had countless sets of fangs when they opened their mouths. 

_Ting. Ding._

All his thought vanished from his mind, leaving only the pub. The sound reverberated throughout the room, a strange, dazzling siren’s song dressed in the sound of a wind chime. All the bar’s denizens were suddenly on edge.

It was not a breeze. It was a storm.

 _Sorcerers._  
#  
“We’ve been keeping tabs on undead activity recently. Our data suggests most of it is concentrated,” the man pointed on a map to a secluded building nestled in some claustrophobic-looking avenues, “here. There are vampires, zombies, ghouls, the whole lot. There’s also a possibility that there’s a lich or two present. Be cautious."

“Ugh, vampires _and_ ghouls? Give me a sodding break. I’m going to reek of decomposing entrails.” A younger woman said.

“The smell is the least of your worries. Make sure no undead leaves there alive – or, walking, even. They’re quite dead as it is, I should think.”

“Alright. We’ll get it sorted,” she said with a huff of disapproval. She turned and left the room, leaving just the man. As the door closed behind her a small smile crept up her face.  
#  
The pub’s wall exploded in to the room with a loud bang, dust spraying out as a group of people in long leather coats stormed in with pistols, rifles and submachine guns held at the ready. 

Beasts immediately began charging at the group whose gun muzzles lit up as bullets began to streak through the air. Symbols, lines and circles lining the weapons began glowing with a vibrant blue light, pulsing each time a bullet left their barrels. The bullets pierced the rotting flesh of the creatures and they dropped to the ground, their bodies carried by the momentum like discarded dolls. Some of the tenants towards the back of the room took out pistols of their own from their trousers and jackets, shooting at the invaders diving behind tipped-over tables and old timber beams.

A woman with long hair took a small phial of fiery orange liquid from her belt and threw it over her table towards a group of grey-skinned things. As it clinked onto the ground she threw her arm over the table and shot the phial blindly, causing it to explode in a great mass of flame, scorching all the creatures in the blast radius. Once her intended targets had burned down she dashed straight through the flames to take cover behind the corner of a wall, her coat un-charred.

From a door leading deeper into the building came a group of skeletons clad from head to toe in pieces of iron armour that looked as if they had each come from a completely different type of suit. Their eye sockets burned with wisps of blue flame that ordered tendrils of energy to move through and sway around their bodies.  
“Three lich over here!” the woman shouted. Her colleagues began to converge on the skeletal beings as the blue energy shot through the air in a number of sharp pole-like shapes that chipped at the sides of battered tables and pillars, missing the coated people by only a hair’s length. She quickly emptied one of her two pistols’ chambers and replaced the ammunition with bright cream-coloured bullets, and when she loaded them back in the symbols on the gun began to glow a honey yellow.

She reared her head, unloaded two rounds into each of the liches’ skulls and then swiveled back into cover before they even realised she had moved. They all staggered back, the blue energy dissipating almost entirely as dull crackles of yellow ran through their armour and bones, flowing outwards from the bullets lodged into them. Brass flew from all directions, only stopping when the guns began to click and the skeletons clattered to the floor.

“Looks like the AO is clear,” one of the men said. 

“Yeah,” the woman replied, “it-” everyone fell immediately silent.

Soft sounds like whispers permeated the air. The floorboards were becoming obscured by a strange black dust that seemed to slowly be moving towards them.

They couldn’t tell where it had come from - some of it looked like it had come from between the floorboards, but as more and more of it appeared they became less and less sure. They had never seen it before. But they knew what it was.

“ _Revenant,_ ” she yelled, “REVENANT! Get out immediately, the mission is off!”

They all bolted for the door, the dust beginning to move faster and faster, coalescing behind them. The door slammed shut as they left.

Curled up in the corner of a battleground, a small, grey-skinned man laid shaking.

_Why is it so fucking cold?_


	2. Dark Days Ahead

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Been a while since I've posted. Juggling exams, revision and fun and this (which is fun in its own right but my brain seems to treat it differently to, say video games) doesn't leave me much time to work on this. It has, however, given me more time to cultivate my ideas into a more cohesive form.

A black and starless sky streaked with emerald green hovered above Edward, who lay in a barren street. Buildings lined the edges of pavement to either side of him, but there was no light, not a soul to be seen and no places that he recognised. Yet even without light he could still see with unusual clarity, though his vision was obscured beyond a point where it became nothing but inky black. And it was getting closer. Something - or, perhaps some _things_? - moved in the shadows, invisible eyes affixed on him, searing into his mind, eager to embrace him. Even if he could move his body, he could not have run away. A muddy, hazy sensation enveloped him.

And then he awoke, his heart pumping. He was in his bed, his duvet exiled to the floor. The curtains were left open a crack and he could see that it was pitch black outside, save for a window of light from a nearby house lost in the darkness. He lifted himself up to read his clock and found that, much to his relief, it was just past midnight and he would have plenty of time to sleep and sink back into his mattress again. Edward's body dropped lazily back onto his bed, having all but forgotten the fear of the nightmare he had just had. For a moment, though, he did think it odd that he had the same nightmare two nights in a row, and that it was so vivid.

#

Every day he remembered how dull the humdrum of normal life can be.

In fairness, Edward's occupation certainly had its more exciting moments - coming up with a clever solution to a problem when he was programming software for his clients was always fun, especially because clever also often meant deceptively simple. It was intensely satisfying to him when he could use a variable or function he had created for one purpose for a totally different one, perhaps tweaking it here or there to make it even more versatile. To him, nothing beat getting a complex system to work together immaculately like a well-oiled machine. But these situations seemed to be a lot rarer as he was assigned to simpler tasks, or he had to put up with some half-baked 'assistant' in the name of making him 'better at working with others,' which seemed completely unnecessary. Even worse, the 'assistant' not only often took away the one fun bit of whatever job he was doing, but also spewed out a pile poorly optimised rubbish with an unintuitive user interface that had Edward screaming inside, because there were simple improvements that would make the software a hundred times more usable that were just so _obvious_. If you were going to be a software designer or any kind of programmer, he thought, you should at least have some base level abstract thinking skills - something that seemed worryingly absent from a good number of his coworkers.

Today, much to his relief, he was able to work at his own pace with little interruption from the buzz being discussed amongst the office flies. He did find it hard to focus, however, when he could hear _actual flies_ in the office and see them making a meal out of a jam doughnut that someone appeared to have left unattended for far longer than they should have. The thought of wasting food so carelessly brought him more sadness than it did anger. Then he remembered he had a nice cup of tea that he should probably-

His hand reached for the mug. The steam had long since stopped rising from it.

A very loud groan filled his cubicle.

#

The rain had caught him partway through his journey back home, but luckily Edward always made it a point to carry an umbrella no matter how clear the sky was or what the weather forecast said. The world was cruel and deceptive by nature, and while science is accurate enough to predict how planets are going to line up exactly at a particular time, or when solar flares would potentially pose a danger, it was a tad inept at predicting the weather of humanity's own home planet. There wasn't a moment of respite for the people walking through town, and especially not those who ran helplessly through buckets of rain without any waterproof gear, their clothes thoroughly drenched. He passed by one of the local pubs, which was as full as one would expect on such a torrential day. Dark, rainy days make for excellent pub atmosphere.

After battling tide upon tide of rain, small cracks opened in the sky revealing the once eclipsed sun and Edward made it to his home, part of a long line of other almost totally identical buildings that stretched into the distance. After a bit of fumbling with his umbrella he got it to close, then he took his keys from his coat pocket and unlocked the door. Coat off, shoes on shoe rack, move the shoes off the rack because they keep falling through it because it has a massive _hole_ in the middle for some reason, then relax on the living room sofa - his standard routine. As he laid down he observed the various piles of paper on his coffee table, which to any outside observer would look cluttered and disorganised, but for Edward everything was where it needed to be - taxes and bills formed one mass, and everything else was unimportant. Probably. He had a flick through just to check. All in order.

Edward spent the rest of his day alternating between hunting giant monsters on one of his handheld consoles, and lying down and daydreaming, the only interruption being when he went to the kitchen to get some food or a drink. Every day was like this, because he simply had nothing else to do outside of work - his parents didn't live anywhere near London, where Edward lived, because besides their son they would have no reason to move, and where he lived was dull a brick mass of unremarkable places. Everything of interest was closer to the city center, where are exorbitant to say the least.

A few hours crawled by, and it was finally late enough for him to go to bed without it feeling wrong. He went up the stairs that stood across the living room, and as he went up he passed a pile of clothes clumped on one of the steps which served as a guilty reminder to do the washing at some undisclosed time. He stepped onto the hard wood floor of his bedroom, which was probably the single most colourful room in all of London - deep blue walls, which he had painted in the hope of maintaining a constant calm, with carefully placed posters of all sorts of comics and games. Some of them weren't even things he had experience with; they just had designs that were visually appealing to him. The duvet was untouched since it had fallen to the floor. It had a worrying habit of cooking anything unlucky enough to be wrapped in it during any kind of heat, but it was the only one Edward had, and really only usable when it was winter, so when he collapsed onto the bed the covers laid undisturbed on their special floor space. The rain still battered everything outside, creating a soothing white noise as his consciousness faded and his body was fully absorbed by his mattress.

#

Once again, Edward was faced with a black sky above him, streaked with green. Again, he felt his body against the cold tarmac of the streets, devoid of life. Darkness closing in, et cetera, et cetera - it was as if life itself had run out of ideas and he was getting quite fed up of it. At least offer something different, he thought. 

But this time would be _very_ different.

That hazy, numbing feeling ran through his body as his vision was covered with a veil of black fog. But then the darkness dissipated in a near instant, and he was still there, and he could feel his body and he could _move_. He was no longer numb, and now he felt as if he had stepped into the arctic - wearing only his grey shirt and bottoms that he wore to bed, plus a pair of colourful mismatched socks. The air felt unnervingly still. Stiffly, he heaved his body off the floor and onto his feet, taking in his surroundings. The amount of detail he could see dumbfounded him - even in a lucid dream, reading anything or making out fine details is practically impossible, yet Edward was able to make out all the pores on individual bricks, the little hidden pebble shapes in the tarmac, and the letters that were left on a worn out building sign were consistent. A great, gaping scar in the earth right by his feet caused him to jump back a distance, threatening to swallow him whole while pale tendrils like vines sprouted from deep within, carrying strange plant-like growths to the surface. Similar ravines slashed the ground all over, some even through buildings, vines threatening to drag the city down under.

Carefully, Edward moved himself to a bit of pavement which didn't have so many precarious cracks, staying away from the bizarre plants. Even though he was mostly convinced that this was all a dream and that nothing could truly hurt him, the flora filled him with a very unsettling feeling. Perhaps it was the fact that the tendrils pulsed as they pumped something to the bulbs sprouting out of them, or the sickly, ghostly pale green they were.

Then it occurred to him to perform a reality check with his hands. Commonly in dreams, your hands will be strange in some way: extra fingers, or generally a strange shape. He looked at his hands, but they were completely normal. He looked away, then back - still normal. Surely everything was far to consistent to be a dream. It felt so detached from reality, but the idea that it wasn't a dream based on the evidence seemed to make sense. That just left the questions of where he was, how he got there, and countless more that he couldn't think through before he caught sight of a group of people wearing dark, buttoned-up jackets approaching him from far down the road, their heads jerking around like quizzical birds looking for something to eat. One of them pointed at him; the rest - numbering 5 - joined the pointing man and started in his direction. Edward stared at them for a few moments, and they seemed to be - oh no, they were _definitely_ walking faster. In fact, they were running at him at top speed, trampling some of the smaller vines under their black boots.

Edward was then running across the streets with only socks to hopefully protect his feet from any harmful elements of the plants, leaping over the larger vines as carefully as he could without losing speed. The men behind him ran like a pack of vicious hyenas, and when one of them closed in on him they threatened to pounce and tackle him to the ground, but a vine snagged his foot and Edward kept running, turning right at the end of the road, but his pursuers were gaining on him and the deathly cold was sapping all the energy from his body.

A man in the shadows watched the chase from the top floor of a dilapidated house. He held his hand to a small earpiece. "Our location was a bit off," he said. "Target's headed eastbound from my position. Mollies are hounding him. Let's intercept them before they grab him." He got up and took his assault rifle off the floor, glad he didn't have to stake out for more than three hours, and darted in the direction the chase was moving.

Suddenly, men and women in dark brown trench coats came one after another from buildings and allies from both behind and in front of the chase, which immediately ground to a halt. They had all manner of weapons raised - most of them had various guns, but some also had swords or daggers. A few didn't even carry weapons. Edward spotted a doll on one's belt, and another person wore a pair of metal bracers on their arms. "Let the man go, Mollies. 'Less you want to duke it out with us." A man came forward, holding a large rifle carelessly in one arm that dangled at his side. "I personally wouldn't fight six to... what, thirty? Thirty of us, I reckon. Dunno the precise numbers. Anyway, that's not the point, whatever magick-ey bollocks your packing ain't gonna cut it against like 27 full auto weapons." Edward stood confused, quizzically looking between the men in black and the newcomers. He was sweating, but frozen cold.

"What if we make a move for 'im right now," one of the pursuers said. He spoke with a strong Irish accent. "Are ye gonna shot 'im to get us?" Taunting, he took a long stride toward Edward, and then a single gunshot pierced the air with a boom as he collapsed onto his knee, shouting a curse.

"Come on, did you really not think we had a few snipers nested around?" the newcomer chuckled. "Next step's gonna cost your head. Now piss off."

"I'M GONNA CLAW YER FUCKIN' EYES OUT," the Irishman screamed, "I AIN'T GONNA FORGET THI-"

He was cut off as one of the other men in black put their hand on his shoulder. Edward now noticed that they each had a strange object hanging off their belts because they all suddenly started glowing, and in only a few seconds they vanished completely. The road went silent until the man with the rifle approached him. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could get any words out Edward interrupted him.

"Alright," he started, "what the _fuck_ just happened, where the _fuck_ am I, who the _fuck_ are you people, and can I please just go home and _fucking sleep?_ "

"Think you need to expand your vocabulary," the rifleman replied.

"After you answer my bloody questions. Also _Jesus_ it's cold."

"That's gonna take a while. But seeing as you were looking around like a lost puppy at us, I reckon you can see in this place, and lucky for you that means you'll get your answers and a nice warm coat. Might be out of luck regarding the sleep, though. C'mere and we'll explain everythin'."

Edward cautiously walked over. This group seemed a fair bit more amiable than the one that was chasing him before - albeit frighteningly large. The rifleman grabbed his shoulder, and he also had an object much like the men in black which began glowing. At that moment, they were no longer on the street.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, original ideas are harder than I imagined... I thought I had most of my stuff planned out, but when actually getting to write it I realised I was missing a lot of specifics. I also struggled to write the bit after the nightmare - how do I get that to flow into his mundane working life? I just put a kind of break in between them, but I know there's probably a better way of getting it all nice and... flow-ey. Also I have no idea at what point I might be over-describing the environment.
> 
> I am having a lot of fun with this, though!


End file.
